The Boys : A Memoir of Hollywood and Family(73)

About the only other thing that truly animated Hank on set was my interest in directing. His first love was the theater, but he could tell that I was different. “I love the theater, that’s an actor’s medium,” he said. “But you love movies, that’s a director’s medium.” He took a lot of pride in his son, Peter, who had cowritten Easy Rider with Dennis Hopper and was now directing a western called The Hired Hand.

Knowing how much I loved movie history, Hank happily regaled me with stories of working with John Ford, his most frequent director, and Preston Sturges. For my seventeenth birthday, he gave me two books, The Film Director as Superstar, a collection by Joseph Geimis of his interviews with iconoclastic filmmakers, and Film Form: Essays in Film Theory, by the pioneering Russian director Sergei Eisenstein. It was a magnanimous gesture and a confidence boost when I was having my doubts about acting. So as depressing as it was to work on a mediocre, going-nowhere show, I came out of The Smith Family supercharged to chase my dream. Like Bob Totten, Hank Fonda was a formidable man who had sized me up as director material and issued a command: Go for it.





16


The Education of R. W. Howard, Director


RON


Making movies became my second love after Cheryl. Actually, I was able to combine my two passions. She became part of my R. W. Howard repertory company, joining my long-term collaborators Clint Howard and Rance Howard.

Heeding Bob Totten’s advice, I got the hell out of my backyard and pursued a more ambitious brand of filmmaking. I decided to up the stakes and enter the Kodak Teenage Filmmaker’s Contest, sponsored by the film company. Because of my Smith Family commitments, I didn’t have time to make a lengthy film. So I entered in the contest’s one-reeler category, which was a real test of discipline. Contestants were given an unexposed cartridge of Kodak Super 8 film that had three minutes and twenty-four seconds worth of footage on it. We were required to turn in our cartridges after filming, exposed but unprocessed—Kodak would do the developing and the evaluating. The biggest challenge is that this made no allowances for editing. The cartridge had to contain the whole film, shot in sequence.

I concocted a Twilight Zone–like fable in which a little boy in a modern-day outfit of ballcap, sweatshirt, and shorts (played by guess who) wanders into the dusty remnants of an Old West town. Suddenly, his cap flies off his head: it’s been shot off. A menacing outlaw from olden times (Dad) appears, challenging the boy to a gunfight. In the blink of an eye, the boy finds himself magically outfitted in a sheriff’s uniform, with a six-shooter at his hip. His courage is fortified by a beautiful young pioneer gal standing off to the side (Cheryl, in a flowing period dress, with her hair pinned up), who winks at him. The boy draws his gun and kills the outlaw with a single shot. Triumphant, he reaches to touch the face of the young woman, only for her to disappear into thin air. He casts a glance at the corpse of the outlaw, which transforms in a flash into a tumbleweed. A moment later, the boy’s sheriff costume is gone and he’s back in his ballcap and tennis shoes. Was it all a dream?

I called this film Deed of Daring-Do. (I meant derring-do, but I’ve never been a great speller.) I didn’t storyboard the film as I would now, but I plotted out thirty-nine camera setups and made a shot list, timing out each one to make sure that I stayed within the cartridge’s limit. One nice variable was that the credit sequence at the end could be as long or as short as I wanted it to be, which allowed me to fill out the cartridge to three minutes and twenty-four seconds on the dot.

We shot it all in one day. I used my Smith Family clout to sneak us all onto CBS’s backlot on Radford Avenue in Studio City, which was where we filmed the show and only a fifteen-minute drive from our house. This backlot had once been the home of Republic Pictures, the low-budget studio that launched the careers of John Wayne, Gene Autry, and Roy Rogers. It still had an Old West street, complete with a post office and a saloon with those swinging shutter doors, that was perfect for my purposes. (Twenty years later, it was reconfigured into a contemporary New York street for Seinfeld’s exteriors.)

I reveled in re-creating some Sergio Leone trademarks, such as framing a shot through the sheriff’s straddled legs as he prepares to take on the other gunfighter. Dad pulled some excellent, hammy villain faces when I did the obligatory close-up of the bad guy’s squinty eyes. I was also pleased with how well we pulled off the special effect of Clint’s hat being shot off his head. It was entirely analog. We hooked a wire to his ballcap, and as he sat down on the edge of a water trough, Dad was lying flat on the ground behind the trough, out of sight, and simply yanked the wire to make the cap fly off.

The tension mounted as we marched our way through the shot list. None of us wanted to be the one who ruined one of the last setups in my carefully programmed sequence, as a single screwup would mean having to start all over again with a fresh film cartridge. But we had rehearsed so well that we nailed every shot and got the film done on the first pass! Clint, Cheryl, and I were relieved. Dad was the only one who wouldn’t have minded a do-over. He was having the time of his life, playing the heel while making a movie with his boys on that famous western backlot.

About the only complication I encountered was an issue with the talent . . .





CLINT


Hey, I immediately liked the concept Ron had for Deed of Daring-Do when he pitched it to me. I liked the gunfight and I liked that the film would be entered in a competition. But c’mon, I was the lead and this was going to take up some of my valuable time. More than just a lark in our backyard. I was used to getting paid for this amount of work.